American sportsmen have long been advocates for strong habitat conservation policies and designations on public lands. This stems from the fundamental principle that every seasoned outdoorsperson understands: good fishing and hunting opportunity requires productive habitat—and for habitat to remain productive it must be kept largely undeveloped.

This advocacy has extended, particularly over the past decade, to the creation and expansion of national monuments. During that time the hook-and-bullet community helped get unique, deserving complexes of public lands such as Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico, Browns Canyon in Colorado, and Berryessa Snow Mountain in California designated as national monuments.

Monuments matter to sportsmen because they protect and provide good habitat, fishing and hunting opportunities, and public access in many places around the country. As the Trump administration has moved to weaken or eliminate habitat protections in several national monuments over the past year, TU and other sportsmen’s groups have generated numerous public expressions of support for monuments.

In one example, in November of last year 56 sportsmen’s businesses and organizations in California and Oregon submitted a letter

This letter was a response to a report from Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke after a "review" of 27 national monuments designated since 1996, ostensibly to determine if their designation had been an example of executive overreach or had ignored local sentiment. Cascade-Siskiyou was one of the four land monuments recommended for an unspecified reduction in size in the Zinke monuments report.

The president acted on this report in December by stripping monument designation from more than 2 million acres in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.

TU has worked hard over the past year to better inform sportsmen and women about the value of monuments and what’s at stake if the Trump administration takes additional actions to weaken habitat protections in places with high sporting values, such as Cascade-Siskiyou and Katahdin Woods and Water national monuments.

Jack Williams, recently retired as TU’s Senior Scientist and former Forest Supervisor for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, has been one of the leading voices from both the scientific and sporting communities urging monument designation for the Cascade-Siskiyou region—both for the initial designation in 2000 and for an expansion of the monument’s boundaries in early 2017 (in part to better protect a rare subspecies of native redband trout in Jenny Creek).

Since his retirement Williams has continued to work with local sportsmen in southern Oregon to defend Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. In recent weeks Williams and other conservation leaders visited with the editorial boards of the Statesman-Journal in Salem and the Register-Guard in Eugene to highlight the scientific and sporting rationales for the monument’s current boundaries.

For more than a century American hunters and anglers have taken the initiative to conserve our best remaining habitat and to ensure that wildlife populations are managed sustainably. The Antiquities Act, and the national monuments that have been established through its use by sixteen presidents since 1906, has directly helped advance these goals. Cascade-Siskiyou and other national monuments help conserve vital habitat and ensure public access and sporting opportunity. We should keep it that way.

--Sam Davidson

Comments

I have to give TU a lot of credit for continually trying to fight the good fight. I say “trying” because it seems that every time one threat to our nation’s fisheries is successfully extinguished, another one rears its ugly head. I’ve sent and signed on to many letters to officials in DC, asking them to be better stewards of our environment, and to be quite honest I feel as though I could accomplish just as much by throwing beans against a wall. Our elected and appointed officials appear to care very little for what those of us who are concerned about these issues think. So long as some project or program serves the almighty god known as “more jobs”, our streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes can turn into waste dumps, and these officials wouldn’t give a damn. But TU keeps pounding away, all the while hoping that something will change. I salute TU and thank it for its willingness to soldier on.